María Elena Morera reversed against AMLO and its mornings: “they serve to intimidate a group of people”

Maria Elena Morera, president of Causa en Común, said that the morning press conferences held by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador function as a kind of mechanism to intimidate a group of people, at the same time they are used to make propaganda.

This was stated in the presentation of the report Analysis of Morning Press Conferences. “There is no, they don't want or don't understand”, in which journalists Leonardo Kourchenko and Javier Solórzano were also present.

He also pointed out that the so-called “mornings” are not a mechanism of transparency and accountability to citizens as the Mexican government intends, since AMLO's communication strategy also serves to manipulate information, Morera said.

Javier Solórzano, for his part, indicated that the Mexican government has “an information maze” that must be confronted with all its dependencies, and stressed that transparency helps contribute to better governance.

The report resumed 764 morning press conferences (from December 2018 to December 2021), of which 420 were devoted to security issues and the activities carried out by the armed forces, so Causa en Común sent requests for access to public information to corroborate the data exposed in the mornings.

In total, the organization made 1,976 requests for information from six institutions linked to security tasks, including: the National Guard (355); the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System (194); the Secretariat for Security and Citizen Protection (440), the National Defense (519), the Navy (295) and the Governorate (198).

In view of this, 29% of the responses obtained to requests for information do not agree, have no basis or avoid providing information under the criteria of “incompetence” (15%), “non-existence” (13%) or “reservation” (1%), while 43% of the responses provided “fully agree” with the information requested, “without this means truthfulness of the information”, the report states.

Likewise, in 57% of cases, institutions did not support statements issued at press conferences and in 16% they only gave “partial information” to some questions.

The institutions that registered the greatest response to the requested information with data related to the questions were the Sedena, the National Guard and the Semar, although this does not imply that the information fully coincides with the statements issued.

For its part, the SSPC was the secretariat that reported the most responses of “incompetence”, while Sedena provided the most responses of “non-existence” of information. Meanwhile, Segob and GN were the institutions that most often “reserve” information.

In this way, the organization concluded that the federal government tends to handle itself with opacity, since it sometimes “hides information”, shirks responsibility and ignores statements made in the morning.

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